The French writer Michel del Castillo, author of several successful novels and essays including “Tanguy”, inspired by his own story, died Tuesday at the age of 91, his relatives announced to AFP.
Author of some 45 books, mostly novels, including his latest “L’Expulsion” published in 2018, Michel Janicot del Castillo, his real name, was born on August 2, 1933 in Madrid to a Spanish mother and a French father. Abandoning his wife and child, the latter returned to France on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Close to the Republicans, his mother, Candida, spent a year in prison then took refuge with her son in the late 1930s in France. Her former husband, from whom she constantly demands money, denounces her to the authorities as an “undesirable foreigner” and has her interned, with Michel, in a refugee camp in the south of France, with harsh living conditions.
Candida herself delivers the little boy to the German police in exchange for her own freedom. He was sent in 1942 to work farms in Germany until the end of World War II. He found a little respite in a Jesuit school in Andalusia where he discovered literature, before being taken in by an uncle and his wife in Paris, beginning studies of letters and psychology and starting to write.
He was awarded the Renaudot Prize in 1981 for “The Night of the Decree”, a thrilling thriller set at the end of the Franco regime, in Spain. In 1991, he received the Femina for “Colette, a certain France”. Among his novels, we will also cite “Death of a Poet”, a thriller in an imaginary country strangely reminiscent of Ceausescu’s Romania, or “The Spanish Carousel”, a satire of the bourgeoisie resulting from the civil war.
In addition to fiction and a little theater, Michel del Castillo, for whom a school in Mende is named, is the author of essays such as “Algeria, ecstasy and blood” (2002) or “Le temps de Franco” (2008). He also produced the Antenne 2 TV series “La saga des Français”.
Member of the honorary committee of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, he spent a large part of his life in Provence, near Nîmes, in the south of France.
